Conveyor rollers are extensively used throughout the world to transport a variety of materials in a wide range of industrial applications. Many facilities, such as manufacturing and distribution facilities, may contain well over a hundred miles of conveyors and have tens of thousands of conveyor rollers. These rollers are often required to carry heavy loads and therefore are most often made of carbon steel due to the high strength of the material.
However, steel rollers have a number of significant drawbacks. For example, steel rollers can be both thermally and electrically conductive which in turn can make them unsuitable for a large number of operational environments. Depending on a number of factors, the price of steel can dramatically vary from year to year and has recently tended to be more expensive. Steel rollers are also prone to rust in applications that require a wash down of the rollers, such as for food processing and/or in highly corrosive environments. Steel rollers have also been found to create an undesirable ringing noise when materials are transported over the rollers.
Various materials have been proposed to replace steel rollers, but none have experienced wide commercial adoption, except in some niche areas. As many in the field know, while concrete has great compressive strength, it has relatively low tensile strength. This aspect dissuaded many in the field from even considering concrete as a potential material. There have been a few rare proposals to incorporate concrete into roller conveyors. For example, polymer concrete conveyor rollers, such as in U.S. Pat. No. 4,955,462 to Bilodeau et al., have been proposed as one possible alternative. However, a number of drawbacks have prevented such rollers being widely adopted in a broad range of commercial applications. Thus, there needs to be an improvement in this field.